DAMAGE BLAME UNCLEAR

A fire safety system poured hundreds of gallons of water on the stage of the newly completed Hamilton Forman Auditorium at Nova High School the night of June 3.

More than a month later, contractors, engineers and architects are struggling over who to blame for damage to the $1.8 million showplace and whether taxpayers will have to pay an estimated $60,000 repair bill.

"Everyone's trying to find an explanation that doesn't include them. There's a lot of money at stake," said Humberto Alonso, the school district's project manager who is investigating the cause of the flood.

Although no one is certain why the auditorium ended up with a 2-foot-deep wading pool, three contractors on the project warned school officials that the fire safety system's design meant trouble. The contractors objected because the sprinkler system could be activated when only one heat detector was triggered.

They "advised the School Board engineer and the architect that they probably should have a failsafe system [a second heat detector) or possibly something could happen," said Fletcher Sessoms, president of the general contractor, Sessoms Construction Co. Inc.

"Well, we didn't do those things and something did happen, the first night of the first event at that auditorium," Sessoms said.

Architect and school officials countered this week that while all the water was pouring out, the alarm bells and lights - installed by the same contractors who installed the sprinkler system - were not set off.

The contractors' concerns, first noted last fall, were repeated in a meeting three months ago with Alonso and Marcel Morlote of the architectural firm of Wolfberg Alvarez & Associates, according to all parties. The front of the stage's ceiling only had a single heat detector directly above the first bank of quartz floodlights. If anything set off the one detector, the water would flow unchecked, said John Allen, vice president of Foxfire Systems Inc., and Kevin Flanagan, president of C&F; Electric Co.

They suggested installing a second detector, at a cost of about $1,500, to be placed elsewhere above the front of the stage ceiling. That way both detectors would have to be set off to allow the water to be released.

But Morlote said on Tuesday that his firm thought that the students' safety would be endangered in a fire if two alarms had to be tripped rather than one.

Additionally, neither the national fire safety code nor the state school building code requires a second sensor, Morlote said.

Since the flood, the architect hired Firepak Inc., a fire protection firm, to evaluate the setup. Their verdict: Although the original design is acceptable and a second detector is not necessary, it is preferable to have a second detector, Firepak partner George de la Torriente said.

The flood occurred after the stage was rented out for the first time on the night of June 2, according to a scenario pieced together from the contractors, Alonso and Morlote.

The lights heated the air, more than 100 people produced a great deal of body heat, and an energy saving system cut off the air conditioning a half-hour to an hour before the program ended.

But school officials said that the lights were turned off when the program ended between 10:30 and 11 p.m. A school employee left the building about 11:45 p.m.

The next morning, a custodian opened the soundproof, watertight doors and found a small pool of water 40 feet wide, a soggy curtain and a watersoaked oak stage.

The water flow can be triggered by a manual switch, but the switch is behind two locked doors, Alonso said.

Morlote scoffed at the idea that the system was triggered by heat because the room could only have gotten cooler, not hotter, after the employees left.

"It must be some new physics that I'm not aware of," he said.

But Flanagan said the heat could have lingered because the building was no longer air conditioned. That leaves the heat sensor as the most likely culprit and that is triggered only by 194-degree heat, the contractors said.

Morlote said that perhaps the equipment was defective or installed incorrectly. The alarm system was not ringing when the custodian arrived, Alonso and Morlote said.

Flanagan disputed that, saying the alarm worked perfectly during an inspection in late May and it worked perfectly the day after the flood.

After the deluge, school maintenance workers spent dozens of hours cleaning up the mess before the formal dedication scheduled for the following week. Since then, they have been replacing drywall and the wooden stage.

But the fire safety system in the unused auditorium remains untouched, awaiting further testing until someone can be held accountable.